A day many players have been waiting for, Last Epoch has finally added in multiplayer amongst a number of other big changes to this action RPG. It's been in Early Access on Steam since April 2019, but also had a Beta outside of Steam back in 2018 so it's been going for some time now but the full release is due later this year and this is a big step towards it.
"Last Epoch combines time travel, exciting dungeon crawling, engrossing character customization and endless replayability to create an Action RPG for veterans and newcomers alike. Travel through the world of Eterra’s past and face dark empires, wrathful gods and untouched wilds – to find a way to save time itself from The Void."
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Some of what's in the patch includes:
- Multiplayer!
- New 3D models for new and existing Uniques.
- New Armor sets for Acolyte, Mage, Primalist, Rogue, and Sentinel.
- New Unique Items.
- Balance Changes, including almost every skill in the game.
- Performance Improvements.
- New Music & Sound.
- New Player animations, and skill VFX.
- New Bone Golem and Manifest Armor models.
- New Enemies.
- Reworked Zones.
- New Monolith Maps.
- Bug Fixes.
Currently, the Native Linux version does suffer from some graphical issues. Like the character classes being pretty much invisible on the character creation screen, aside from that though (which is annoying but not game-breaking) it does seem to work quite well. The bug has been there for over a year, so I sure hope they look to solve it soon…
Looks like the new update has given it quite the surge in popularity too, with it hitting a new all-time high of 40,591 just recently. Before this, it would only see 1-2K players online on an average day.
Have you been playing? What do you think to the new update?
You can buy it on Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
1. On Linux native, using mesa, I had to use -force-vukan to get any textures to load in this game. This was first reported to Last Epoch on the Steam Forums in 2018, so it's incredibly disappointing it's still not fixed.
2. When transitioning from one zone to another in multiplayer, the guest will frequently disconnect if they click on the zone transition first, before the host (who was on Windows). Pretty frustrating, so I switched the game to Proton Experimental and removed -force-vulkan. After doing so, I didn't get any disconnects through around 5 hours of play, even when the host and I were in entirely different zones for extended periods (which is rare, but sometimes happened if we needed to offload loot).
Other than the -force-vukan issue, performance seemed reasonable. My beast PC handled it no problem, and my mate who is on Windows with 1060 also oggled at the pretty graphics and commented how smooth it played. So the heavy optimisations you can read about in their blog have paid off. Zone transitions still take a few seconds to load though.
The long and short of it - this is finally a game that scratches my Grim Dawn itch. It's a little more "zoomed in" than GD, but nowhere near as bad as Path of Exile. Build customisation is decent (although we're only just level 20) and the various skills are inventive. For example, the mage has a skill called "static" that deals immense damage, but he need to move around to build up charge! The Acolyte has a hilarious skill where she summons flaming zombies who then run screaming at the nearest enemy and explode - like those bomb guys from Serious Sam. They're hilarious and can get you into trouble sometimes by running off to attack a horde of enemies you hadn't spotted!
Lots of fun, basically. Really enjoying it.
2+ years for fixing a platform-specific bug?
DamonLinuxPL Mar 13, 2023
Vulkan API not working or maybe another worked before multplayer patch with 1-3 FPS. So picture slider and not a game. Now after multiplayer patch - Vulkan api load up to main menu (still feels like 1-3 FPS) and then whole game crashing.
Only OpenGL render works but... with many major issues.
Dana Souly Mar 13, 2023
I hope they will do a steamdeck verification, then all the issues should be addressed.
Quoting: TriasSpend a few hours in single. Apart from no-textures-during-choosing-a-character at the beginning, I encountered no notable bugs. Performance was also good on my side. :).
If you got the no-textures during character select, then you're probably missing the mini-map borders, ground textures and quite a few particle effects. The game was much, much prettier with -force-vulkan for me. But I did the same - played for 45 minutes thinking this was the experience, then went hunting for Linux issues and discovered that vulkan fixed so much of the game's engine.
Quoting: JarmerIf you go into steam for the game, and force it to use proton experimental, the game will do an update then it fixes all the texture stuff. Character choice screen is fine, etc... I played it a bunch yesterday without any issues at all. Really liking it!
Or just use -force-vulkan on the native version, provided you don't intend to do multiplayer with Windows users.
Last edited by scaine on 13 March 2023 at 6:01 pm UTC
Offline play is promised at release. Shady stuff IMO.
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